What If There Are No Happy Endings?

Tonal music operates to a large degree according to teleological principles. Typically it possesses an integral relational order which in its large-scale and small-scale organisation is sense as directional,, driving towards rest and closure, often (but not always) leading to some kind of goal or ‘gathering together’ of the whole temporal process. . . . This teleological dybamic is generated primarily through the twin elements of tension and resolution. Configurations of tension and resolution work in many different ways and at many different levels, potentially engaging every parameter of music. – Jeremy Begbie,Theology, Music, and Time, pp. 37-38

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‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’

Said then the lost Archangel, ‘this the seat

That we must change for Heaven?—this mournful gloom

For that celestial light? Be it so, since he

Who now is sovereign can dispose and bid

What shall be right: farthest from him is best

Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme

Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields,

Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,

Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,

Receive thy new possessor—one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. – John Milton, Paradise Lost

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Kanye West, on his album The College Dropout, argues that God loves hustlers, pimps, killers, prostitutes and other people that society would otherwise not deal with. Tupac questions if there is a heaven for real Niggaz – changing the letter s to z to indicate class rather than individual. Big Syke asks if the church can handle Hip Hoppers, while KRS-One has suggested that Hip-Hoppers need to start their own church. Hip Hoppers have strong opinions about God and the church – there’s no doubt about that! – Daniel White Hodge, The Soul of Hip-Hop: Rims, Timbs And A Cultural Theology, p.21

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Dore’s Woodcut Of Lucifer Just After The Fall Into The Pit. “‘Tis better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

Of the many things about Death Metal that I wish to make clear, perhaps most significant is its character as protest music. What, after all, could be a greater protest than a protest against Divine governance? How better to protest the often stifling conditions of an enforced social mediocrity and moral code that only seems to apply to one portion of society? Couching rejection of political, social, and cultural conformity in grand, sweeping ways, with a music that is loud, complex, and through its style (physical and musical) more than hints at violence along with blasphemy is a good way to make clear one’s frustration with the status quo.

Part of the problem with this approach, of course, are those who take all this blasphemy, celebration of violence, and even celebration of particular Satanic qualities too literally. Whether it’s the early works of Morbid Angel, or just the name of a band, such as Death or Possessed, the casual listener (if such a thing could exist for a music as intense as this) could become caught up in the imagery, and reject both what is said as well as how it is said without considering the message needs to be heard; and needs to be heard as it is presented.

Take the aforementioned Possessed as an example. Formed in the mid-1980’s in San Francisco, they certainly presented a devilish image, including an inverted cross in their logo, singing songs like “Pentagram” and “Evil Warrior”. Yet, they were all still in high school. Their manager was the mother of a friend of the band members. Their parents drove them to gigs, where they had to get permission to perform because the oldest member was 17. They still went to school, including one to a Catholic school. As member Larry LaLonde said, “If you believe in all this Satan stuff, you have to be stupid!” This is devilry as revelry, a bunch of high school students who thought it would be “cool” to play heavy metal draped in dark imagery. One always needs to have a certain sense of humor when approaching any music, even music that takes itself seriously.

For the moment, however, I am less concerned with the lyrical content of Death Metal’s protest, than of looking at how the music acts as a form of protest music. As Jeremy Begbie notes, most western music, orchestral or popular, operates with that tension-and-release sense of movement. Consider Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as the sine qua non of the classical style employing this compositional technique. The whole Symphony moves, almost with a feeling of inevitability, toward the final movement, where even the solo voices become enveloped in the intensity of chorus and orchestra declaring human triumph. That crashing end, often imitated, even in popular music (two very different examples are Tool’s “Forty-Six And Two” and Genesis’s “Musical Box”), declares more than just an end to a piece of music. It declares a kind of victory.

The use of this particular musical technique in popular music is exemplified by Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven”, although King Crimson’s “Starless” has one of the best, and longest, build-up of tension I know. In any case, changes in dynamics, timbre and instrumentation, and even vocalization all contribute to a sense of movement from point A to point Z. From rhythm and blues through rock and roll, soul, funk, and rock, this technique offers excitement, giving listeners a reason to move with the music to its conclusion.

While protest music takes various forms, from the folk music of the early 1960’s through the anti-Vietnam War songs of the late 1960’s to hip-hop’s many targets of protest, with Death Metal we have both a far more primal form of protest – consider the growling, screaming vocal styles – along with a far more sophisticated musical approach, combining both speed and technique with high volume to create the most extreme musical style. With these various techniques to create extremity, the listener is overwhelmed with the sense of rage and frustration at the heart of Death Metal*

Bands like Slayer, the previously mentioned Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, and Deicide are less concerned with creating a sense of motion than they are demanding that time stop, that the various narratives we construct about our lives – or are constructed for us by the powers that be – be silent. The exemplar, however, of this approach to composition is the Richmond, VA-based Lamb of God. Whether in its protest against religion in “In Your Words”, it’s dismissal of faux-Southern rebels in “Again We Rise”, or its demand to be heard on its own terms in “Walk With Me In Hell”, Lamb of God’s musical approach is one of relentless attack, using speed, volume, the timbres of the dual bass drum style called “blast beats” that, precisely because of this intensity and extreme speed brings to a halt any sense of time’s motion. Listeners are forced to sit in a chair and hear that religion is hypocritical and violent; that “southern pride” is more than a bunch of nonsense, but a product corporate America sells to southerners ignorant of their own history; and that declaring particular words offensive and particular points-of-view as unintelligible ignores a reality all too familiar to too many.

Which is precisely why we in the churches need to hear what it being said. We need to pay close attention precisely to how it is said (an affirmative answer to my wife’s long-ago question, “Why do they have to be so angry?”). Most of all, we need to be cognizant of this demand that time stop precisely so those forgotten and unheard will be heard. Death Metal is an extreme protest against so much in our world that forces too many to conform in ways that do violence to the shared realities of so many. Filled with rage, the only way to be heard not only is to be loud; it is to demand a halt to the tyranny of time’s relentless march so that marching doesn’t stomp yet more in to history’s bloody ground.

*This not a sweeping generalization. Much Death Metal uses the familiar techniques of tension-and-release, particularly when the band prefers to create a sense of narrative with its own logic and motion. Opeth is the best example I know, although there are many others.

This Is The Story So Far

In the halls of the tormented,
screams abound never ended
Children of the damned
Forever Tortured, Unyielded and Unrepentant,
Tormented eyes burned away in those that forever wish to go home and enter into the halls of the living
Children of the damned
forever chained
heretics, lunatics, warped minds and false believers who played with madness
All who perish away in vanity
burning away into endless nights of eternity – Deadworld, “Halls Of The Tormented”

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This Lent, I’ve been journeying inside myself, turning over the rocks and seeing what slithers away from the light.  I have to admit that I don’t think I’ve done the whole thing justice.  After all, I know – even more than I could ever write or convey – what darkness lies within me.  It seems, instead, I’ve raised a glass in toast rather than deal with the reality that is my own brokenness, the sin that eats away at every attempt I’ve made to be rid of what one hymn writer called “that one dark blot”.  Oh, I know that sanctification is both a process and something that comes from cooperation with the Holy Spirit, a giving over of the self to the power of God, practiced in disciplined, loving community in which others support me, and we all support one another as we journey forward, the hope of perfection in love the goal, the stripping of the ego the means.

When I started this, I wrote the way would be bordered by horrors.  The truth is, I look around me and what I see are the sad whining of a middle-aged, middle-class white dude.  The truth is simple: I haven’t dug enough because I’m afraid.  While I know this Lenten Discipline I’m practicing isn’t the end of my Christian journey toward perfection in love, it feels like I’ve finally arrived at the place within me where the worst parts dwell: Prejudice and bigotry; hatred, a kind of murderous rage with no object; the fear that, without the presence of God in my life, I would feel no empathy for others, feel no desire for justice, feel no love toward anyone, including my family.  Deep in places I would prefer not allow others to see, there lurks this creature that wears my face, speaks in my voice, yet would relish the power to destroy, to kill, to become that which all of us fear most.

I haven’t gone there yet because to do so would be to show others that I am no true Christian soul.  On the contrary, as the Psalmist writes in Psalm 51, my sin is ever before me.  When I say “sin” I don’t mean the petty actions to which all humanity is prone.  I’m talking about the capacity I know is there for me to toss it all aside, to rend my life apart, laughing madly in the joy of rage, madness, and death.  It’s like in those movies where someone breaks through a layer of rock or dirt only to discover not the beautiful light of shining diamonds, or some lost utopia.  Instead, a sickly light, nauseating even at a glance, emerges along with screams of terror mixed with the demented voices of the demons and the damned.  Covering it up, of course, is nonsense.  Once that portal is opened, it can never be closed except by some force greater than any human being, or group of human beings, can muster.  The evil within escapes, and either possesses those stupid enough to open the door, or kills them.  Sometimes both.  This is the point at which I find myself.

I stand on the threshold of places I would prefer not acknowledge exist within myself.  Up ahead on this path, I see dead and decaying trees, smell the rot of putrescence and ordure, hear the sound of my own madness, my own malice, my own declaration of my power, my desire to stand where none but God can stand.  I do not want to move forward.  I also know that through this wasteland lies the only way I can arrive at the cross, where the journey will offer me choices: I can run and hide; I can stand and laugh and mock, throwing stones, denying Jesus even the dignity of a death free from the evil he came to end; or I can collapse before the cross, with all the baggage I have carried along this journey and, through my weeping, hope beyond any reasonable hope there is, as the hymn says, room at the cross for me.

In the meantime, what I hear sounds far more like the song below than any song of God’s victory.  And I sing along because, right now, that is where I stand.  This is, indeed, the story so far.